Coffee at Lukes An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest

by Jennifer Crusie (Editor) in stores May 1, 2007

Genres:

Non-Fiction, Pop Culture

Themes:

essays , Gilmore Girls , pop culture , TV shows

Book Excerpt

• send excerpt in an email
• download as pdf
• add social bookmark

Introduction: Speaking of the Gilmore Girls...
by Jennifer Crusie

Welcome to Coffee at Luke's, a collection of people talking about Gilmore Girls, which is so appropriate. The success of Gilmore Girls can be attributed to many things: the beauty and charm of its protagonists, Lorelai the mother we all wish we’d had (or been), and Rory the daughter we all wish we’d been (or had); the warm and quirky charm of Stars Hollow, the community where nobody is ever lost or alone; the slow-burn sizzle of the romance between Lorelai and Luke, now gone horribly awry but still a winner for six long seasons; the parade of Rory’s boyfriends, each more attractive and impossible than the last; the anyone-can-relate Friday night disasters of dinner with Emily and Richard; and the crackle of the supporting cast, especially the acerbic Paris (who takes antisocial disorder to new heights), Kirk (who makes cluelessness an art form), and Miss Patty (who embraces life to the point of smothering it in her bosom). Even Paul Anka the dog has his own dysfunctional charm. Yes, all of these aspects contribute to making Gilmore Girls a Tivo staple, but the real draw that’s kept viewers coming back season after season? Oh, that’s the talk.

Yep, it’s the whip-fast, quip-smart, sassy patter that Lorelai dishes out and Rory bats back like some kind of party game for smarty pants, the Cool Girls verbal twister, pitched right at us so we all can play. All teleplays have dialogue but very few of them use it well, and none of them rely on it the way that Gilmore Girls does: almost to the point of being a talking heads show, with very little physical comedy and fairy tale sets that function as a backdrop for beautiful people adept at delivering complex speech at the speed of light. Crafting that speech is a tightrope act the writers walk every week, and they walk it pretty damn well, in part, I think, because they keep in mind the basic rules for great dialogue:

Keep it moving.

Boy, do they. Well, they have to. On a typical television show, one page of script equals one minute of show and the average television script is about fifty to fifty-five pages (leaving room to cut the filmed results to forty-eight minutes of running time), but the Gilmore Girls scripts run seventy-seven to seventy-eight pages. that means no dawdling, so the characters rattle off the line like escapees from His Girl Friday. Call it Our Girls Tuesday, the screwball fastball of comic repartee that’s not only swift but complex, often overlapping not only conversations but also conflicts:

RORY: Hey. My mom’s not wearing any underwear.
LORELAI: Oh!
RORY: Well you aren’t.
TAYLOR: You’re just being selfish, Luke.
LORELAI: Still they don’t notice. I can’t take it anymore.
TAYLOR: We’re talking about the spirit of fall.
LORELAI: (gets the coffee herself and lifts the cover off the muffins) What kind of muffin do you want?
RORY: Blueberry.
LUKE: You know where you can stick the spirit of fall? (hands Lorelai a utensil to pick up the muffins) Here, don’t use your hands.
TAYLOR: I don’t think you’re taking me seriously.
LUKE: What gave you that idea? (To lorelai, who is leaving) No tip?
LORELAI: Oh, yeah, here’s a tip . . . serve your customers.
LUKE: Here’s another . . . don’t sit on any cold benches. (“Kiss and tell,” 1-7)

It takes very good writers to put dialogue like that on the page and keep it not only clear but entertaining while moving the story along. If you took the character tags off those lines and read it, you’d still know what show it came from because dialogue like that only happens in Stars Hollow.

Give everybody the best lines.

How can the writers do that? When characters are so distinct that they can’t possibly talk alike, the best lines for them can only be theirs. There are several television writers who are well-known for their dialogue, but too many of them fall into the trap of everybody-sounds-the-same. This rarely happens on Gilmore Girls where you can pretty much tell without tags who says, “This festival is commemorating the founding of our town, young lady” (“Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers,” 1-16). Or who says, “You know, it’s times like these that you realize what is truly important in your life. I’m so glad I had all that sex” (“Say Goodnight, Gracie,” 3-20). Or who says, “Look, I’ve had my peace with the fact that everyone who calls here is a notch above brain dead, and that the pennies I am thrown each week are in exchange for me dealing with these people in a nonviolent manner, and usually that is fine, but today, sorry lady, I have ennui” (“Love, Daisies, and Troubadours,” 1-21). Or, God help him, who says, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, much like the Israelites of Yore, the Stars Hollow minutemen languished in the desert for forty years. But tonight, there was no Promised Land, no new Canaan, only a humiliating five to one defeat at the merciless hands of the West Hartford Wildcats. So it’s back to the desert for the minutemen, perhaps for another forty years. Of course, by then, I’ll be seventy years old. A lot of the rest of you will probably be dead. Taylor, you’ll be dead. Babette, Miss Patty. . . that man there in the hat” (“Face-Off,” 3-15). Even the walk-on parts are worth listening to because even they have places they’ve been and places they’re going to, full and fascinating lives, pieces of which they let drop into the story like seasoning. Everybody gets the best lines.

Talk up to your viewer.

I don’t know when “dumbing down” began to seem like a good idea on tv, but it’s a mistake and the writers on Gilmore Girls know it. Their mantra is “Everybody’s smart and so are you.” So what if some of the allusions go over some viewers’ heads? The rest of them won’t. I know this because I’m a complete music illiterate, but I never feel lost when Rory and Lane talk about groups or CDs. That takes some very careful writing and I’m appreciative. It’s conversation where everybody knows the game, and you feel as though you could play, too, if only you were there. But what’s really impressive is the breadth: allusions to film, television, literature, music, society, and politics, spanning decades, are just dropped into the conversation and then trampled on as the characters rush on to the next crisis, never slowing to complain or explain:

LORELAI (to Rory): We’re not gonna have this fight in a flowery bed room with dentists singing “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” in the background. It’s too David lynch! (“The Road Trip to Harvard,” 2-4)

PARIS: Wow, you’re always so Desmond Tutu-y. This is refreshing. (“We’ve Got Magic to Do,” 6-5)

BABETTE: Now don’t you freak out. Morey hates being the first anywhere. He thinks it hurts his street credibility.
MOREY: Charlie Parker was late to everything.
BABETTE : Charlie Parker had more drugs in him than a Rite-Aid. Forget Charlie Parker. (“The Bracebridge Dinner,” 2-10)

LORELAI: You will say nothing, you will do nothing, you will sit in the corner and offer no opinions and pull a full-on Clarence Thomas. (“Secrets and Loans,” 2-11)

EMILY: What do you think of the Romanovs?
LUKE : They probably had it coming. (“Dead Uncles and Vegetables,” 2-17)

and my personal favorite:

LUKE : Very romantic.
LORELAI : Says the man who yelled “Finally!” at the end of Love Story. (“Let the Games Begin,” 3-8)

Dumb dialogue is boring dialogue; the writers on Gilmore Girls never make that mistake.

Remember that the best dialogue is the stuff you can’t hear.

I’m a dialogue junkie in my own work, so believe me when I tell you that the most important thing about dialogue is what isn’t said. On-the-nose talk is another form of dumbing down, leaving the viewer no chance to make the connections; worse than that, it’s not real. People in real life do not tell it like is, they tell it slant, and that’s why the good stuff isn’t in the words, it’s all around them.

It’s in the spaces between the beautifully parallel non-sequiturs, like this exchange of afflictions:

MADELINE : My brother has measles.
LOUISE : My mom’s having an affair. (“Concert Interruptus,” 1-13)

It’s in the rhythms of the you-know-damn-well-what-i-mean rapid fire exchanges that read like poetry:

LORELAI: She’s not going on your motorcycle.
DEAN: I don’t have a motorcycle.
LORELAI: She’s not going on your motorcycle.
DEAN: Fine, she won’t go on my motorcycle. (“Kiss and Tell,” 1-7)

It’s in the exasperated missed connections that make conversations look like performances by trapeze artists with sweaty hands:

EMILY: So what exactly is going on between the two of you?
LUKE: Nothing. Really. We’re friends, that’s it.
EMILY: You’re idiots, the both of you. (“Forgiveness and Stuff,” 1-10)

And it’s the dialogue that plays on the viewer’s knowledge of the world of the show, written with haiku-like economy:

LORELAI: The world changes when it snows. It’s quiet. Everything softens.
MICHEL: It’s your mother.
LORELAI: And then the rain comes. (“Love and War and Snow,” 1-8)

It takes a great deal of trust in and respect for your audience to leave the best part unsaid, and the writers of Gilmore Girls clearly have a lot of both; it’s not that surprising, then, that viewers have repaid them with the same.

Given that it’s such a showcase of dialogue, it’s not surprising that Gilmore Girls is one of the most quoted series in the history of tv or that, when I read the essays for this collection, so many of them cited such terrific exchanges from past seasons. They were having so much fun, I wanted to play, too, so I went back and found quotes that evoked the spirit of their essays, recalling how the people of Stars Hollow spoke about personal relationships (they’re terrible at them), parenting (still trying to get it right), the town (quirky doesn’t begin to describe it), the good things in life (food, books, and sex, not necessarily in that order), and reality (always optional). The opinions here are many and varied but the essayists all share a love of the show and the fast-talking people in and behind it, and they’re all here to, well, talk about it. Because in the world of Gilmore Girls, that’s what you do. . . .

RORY: Well, you know, I guess we don’t have to talk about . . . stuff. Yeah . . .
LORELAI: Who say we always have to be talking? We can not talk!
RORY: Of course we can.
(the two pause for a moment.)
LORELAI: Okay, we should probably talk about how we’re not gonna talk . . . (“The Long Morrow,” 7-1)

So welcome to the Gilmore Girls anthology. I hope you find something terrific on every page. And when you’re done, I’ll be at Luke’s if you want to, you know, discuss it.

Talk to you soon,
Jenny

send this excerpt to a friend (or yourself)